How to Make the Perfect TRL Video
LatestMy fascination with music videos started in high school, when MTV started airing it’s iconic countdown show, Total Request Live, or TRL. My somewhat-accidental career as a music video director began around the same time TRL aired it’s final episode. Since then, videos have migrated to the internet, budgets have dropped, and boy bands have traded choreographed dancing for rock instruments. I started This Day In TRL as a way to revisit the show’s classic videos, with added insights from my day job as a music video director. In the spirit of my site, here are a few ingredients that defined videos from TRL‘s heyday.
Enormous Sets
Nothing exemplifies TRL-era excess like gigantic constructed sets, a luxury that modern music videos can no longer afford. Constructed by massive crews in airplane hangers, they took the cinematic ambition of Janet Jackson’s expansive warehouse from Rhythm Nation (dir. Dominic Sena) and super-sized it into a theme park ride. Britney Spears’ gargantuan performance backdrop for Oops!… I Did It Again (dir. Nigel Dick) is a multi-tiered set that looks large enough to house it’s own ecosystem. NSYNC’s soundstage for Pop (dir. Wayne Isham) comes with multiple rooms, rotating turntable stages and so many programmable lights you could probably see it from space.
When physical stages weren’t big enough, directors leaned into computer generated locations, like the bizarre combination of Blade Runner and Sim City that Jessica Simpson dances through in Irresistible (dir. Simon Brand).
The same post-FX company must have also designed the intro to Evanescence’s Bring Me To Life (dir. Philipp Stölzl), which looks identical, but with the tone dial switched from “Sleek Futurism” to “Dystopian Goth”.
Sexy Stalking
When the goal was to showcase a male pop singer’s irresistible charisma, directors turned to a concept best described as “Sexy Stalking”. It’s a simple pitch: the artist becomes so taken by a stranger’s beauty that he drops everything to pursue her with the eerie persistence of the T-1000 in Terminator 2. You can trace this concept back to Michael Jackson’s classic The Way You Make Me Feel (dir. Joe Pytka), a 7 minute prelude to a restraining order that was replicated ad nauseam in the early 00’s. Justin Timberlake dabbled in it with his 2003 video for I’m Lovin’ It (dir. Paul Hunter), where mere fleeting eye contact with a woman from across a bustling Manhattan street motivates an arduous, day-long chase sequence across the five boroughs. R&B underdog Mario doesn’t take a hint from the title of his own song in Just A Friend (dir. Diane Martel), where he corners his reluctant crush in a packed movie theater, and forces her to sit through his endless choreographed pleading.
You can leave it to Enrique Iglesias to stretch the concept to it’s logical extreme with his aptly-titled, Escape (dir. Dave Meyers), which features Enrique slyly trapping his girlfriend, Anna Kourniqova, in a women’s restroom and pinning her against a sink.
It’s interesting to note that when the tables were turned, videos usually depicted equally smitten women as crazy-eyed psychos. In NSYNC’s Bye Bye Bye (dir. Wayne Isham), an attractive model pushes the boundaries of clingy-ness when she chases the band across the top of a moving train and even sicks attack dogs on Justin Timberlake.